To work with real problems and solutions you need close peer-groups. You must feel free and comfortable to ask naïve and hard questions So, from whom to do you ask these questions? With whom do you come up with possible solutions to the problems?
(1) From your mother and father, from your best teachers, your close friends;
or
(2) from the feeds in your PLE and the blogosphere?
To put it in the fashionable terms of “networks” you basically ask (good) questions from and with the people with whom you have strong links. In his theory of social ties, Granovetters (1973) gives the following factors for strength of a tie: amount of time spent, emotional intensity, intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal service associated with the tie.

Someone I met once (at a job no less, no one I would normally have met in my self-selected communities) had this thesis about California (where I was living at the time). He said that Californians were less accessible, more guarded, less community-oriented because the weather is so nice in Cali. His hypothesis was that the bad weather in other regions of the country forces people to rely on each other more and thus creates in people the predisposition to be more community-oriented. In California no one had to depend on anyone in ice, tornadoes, snow, etc. So the culture was more isolated, alienated. Now I personally think there are a lot of contributing factors to the California culture, but it’s an interesting point. How does the ability to choose and construct your entire environment lend itself to the attitude of “ok I’m bored, moving on” that seems to prevent long-term bonding in online communities? (or even real-time communities these days). Any self-chosen community is going to have the element of “Ok, I can re-choose and leave”.

In sum, I think this is a larger sociological issue of our times. Not sure how to solve it. I struggle it with myself as I find myself joining groups, and then moving on when they don’t perfectly match my expectations, and then feeling like oh, why don’t I have stronger connections to things? Perhaps it is a developmental thing–perhaps at a certain point in development you realize that to develop true connections you have to put up with people who are not there *just* to entertain you. I dunno. Just some thoughts.

For me, the software needs to progress to help bring together “like-minds”. I believe Netflix is a perfect example of this. Their recommendation engine and how it ties into “Friends” is excellent. It shows me how close in taste I am to my friends, therefore helping with recommendations. Its good to know that through usage, So-and-so is 80% similar to me. If they make a recommendation, I must watch that film.

I believe this can be applied to community websites. Creating blobs of like-minded people through activity, tastes, preferences, etc, which helps me see the people I really want to be exchanging with. Then as we get closer, we become friends and “friends” are real and trackable.

To me, people don’t leave communities because they found something different. They just stop participating because it is no longer relavant. As long as relavance is there, participation continues. And when on netflix, i get a message saying, “so-and-so hated Gone with the Wind, but you loved it. Want to discuss it with them?” then I am urged to continue because it is not only relavant to my tastes in films, but more so because so-and-so is a friend and friday night we might get a beer to discuss our love/hatred for Gone with the Wind.

I agree that face-to-face interaction is an important part of what makes online communities strong, but there is no precise mapping between “people who feel connected via an online community” and “online community members who have met face to face.” I would suggest, rather, that it’s the communities that encourage and enable regular face-to-face involvement that enjoy the kind of attention that you (rightly) praise, indeed that the mere fact of the regular face-to-fact interaction happening and being talked about in the online sphere contributes to a higher ‘reality index’ – which is probably associated meaningfully with stickiness and attentiveness.

but there’s another curiosity to this. I find that, often, the folks who trumpet the loudest about the merits and importance of online community are folks who have taken it one other step and have met one another f2f. In my own vetures among the bloggerati, I’ve found f2f to be a powerful component to gaining recognition (not *just* one’s writing–esp. if you’re female. in the eyes of many blogger males, we perceived as less than “serious.))

yet I think online reflects offline in this sense: think about the guy you have a conversation with at a bar. You might know *of* him, but you can’t say your really *know* him. You can only say that if you meet him outside the bar as well as in it. Same with online. You can say that you know *of* someone via their comments and such–but the f2f meeting at a conference or other circumstance raises the significance and meaning of the relationship.

Online interaction also seems to reflect the way we socialize in late adolescence: and how many of us notice when so and so from “the group” ceases to show up? There may be a few of us who get concerned and call–but it’s rare when the entire group really cares, and is often content to find out second hand. Such is, in my expriece, the case with life onine. Perhaps, then, it’s a matter of gaining maturity (or is it just that online will always be the domain of those of a certain age group and will always reflect their social customs?)

If I was going to launch a group online, real names would be a requirement. I used to host in-person book discussion groups at a bookstore in pre-internet days, and anyone who refused to give their name was thought to be a bit odd. Why shouldn’t the same rules apply online?

To take it a step further, if we know that Dave has a furniture store in Anytown, Texas, and Mary is a sheepherder in Wyoming, then we can have a better sense of who’s in the discussion and why they might care about a particular group. Of course there will always be those who are using the internet to exercise an alter ego, or experimenting with an alternate identity, but mostly, people don’t mind sharing who they are.